Daniel Debouck, genebank manager at CIAT in Colombia, is featured in the next issue of Bioversity’s Geneflow magazine. Daniel is a world expert on beans. And an esteemed colleague.
Taro gets the social networking treatment
John Cho is a plant pathologist and taro breeder at the University of Hawaii. A few days ago he posted a youtube video on his Facebook wall. It shows some very successful trial results from the Dominican Republic. The experiment in question is the evaluation for taro leaf blight resistance of some hybrids from Dr Cho’s breeding programme. Unfortunately, the interview with pathologists Drs Graciela Godoy and Miguel MartÃnez of the Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Agropecuarias y Forestales (IDIAF) is in Spanish, and John doesn’t speak that language. So he asked his Facebook friends to help, and one of them, an agronomist from Puerto Rico, sent him a translation. Now John knows that the promising hybrids are 2002-21f (H2 to IDIAF), 2000-109 (H4) and MS3 (H6) — and so do we, 1 because John provided the gist of the results as a comment on the video on his wall. Isn’t social networking great? Now, if only that information would make it into some germplasm database. Any germplasm database.
LATER: It gets better. In the latest exchange of comments on the original video post, John’s Spanish-speaking agronomist friend tells him how some of his hybrids did in Puerto Rico. Who needs databases?
Bringing back the aurochs
From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.
Anyone who has seen Jurassic Park (and who hasn’t) will understand how this film has stirred the imagination by suggesting the possibility of bringing back species that have long gone extinct. Add to that the recent breakthroughs in our ability to retrieve and decipher genomes obtained from tissues of animals that have perished thousands of years ago and you can understand the excitement. Italian scientists now claim to have a rough draft of the genome of the aurochs, a wild bovid that roamed Europe until perhaps as late as the 17th century and which is depicted so beautifully in the cave paintings in Lascaux. With the genome map as a compass the Italians are convinced that they can now breed back the aurochs using contemporary cattle breeds as a starting point.
Such attempts are, of course, not new and there are bovids around that are thought to resemble the aurochs. But in the past such efforts were always fraught with a fair degree of uncertainty because they relied entirely on phenotypic information gleaned from drawings or written descriptions. Having actual genetic information of the aurochs takes that uncertainty out of the equation. Whether the Italians’ efforts will be more successful is hard to predict because they are based on the assumption that all of the genetic information of the aurochs can still be found somewhere in modern cattle. And it is far from clear whether that is the case. But even if it isn’t, having the aurochs genome at hand, it may one day be possible to make the necessary genetic changes to transform a modern cattle embryo into an aurochs embryo and have that embryo then carried to term in a modern cow. And if you can bring back the aurochs, it may quite well be possible to bring back animal breeds that have similarly vanished. Still sounds a bit like science fiction? Perhaps, but nobody ever thought you could clone a sheep.
Nibbles: Old lentil, Cassava pests, Gates the reconciler, Gardeners
- 4000 year old lentil sprouts.
- It looks bad for cassava in SE Asia.
- Bill Gates speaks out on sustainability and productivity.
- “Gardeners must unite to save Britain’s wildlife.” We say: what about Britain’s landraces?
What’s your favourite agrobiodiversity read?
A request comes in from our friend Danny Hunter. Help him out!
Now that the noughties have drawn to a close I would like to ask colleagues what they felt were their top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade. It might be an article or a book. It might even be a blog or one of the new fangled ways of disseminating information. It could be something general or a specific piece of work that was fundamental to our understanding of agricultural biodiversity, how it is conserved, managed, utilised. As well as the details of the article or book, a brief explanation of why you thought the work important would be much appreciated.